Wednesday, February 22, 2006

A little more calm

If you haven't made yourself familiar with Prof. Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog, now would be a good time. In the last 48 hours, things on the ground in Iraq have gone from very bad to worse, as Sunni attacks breed Shiite reprisals and vice versa.

It's not getting so much front-page coverage in the US press yet, but even über-dick Bill O'Reilly, albeit in a necessarily (for him) semi-sarcastic cop-out, is calling for "cutting-and-running" all of a sudden. If it takes O'Reilly to get people to realize that we need a plan like Murtha's or even the more tepid version that may soon be put forward by Dems, then so be it.

You would prefer a world where the Shiite death squads and Sunni bombers do the same? Wait, no, you would prefer a world where sudden, random death and destruction rain down on those children and their parents? You prefer a world where those people die in a civil war? How about a world in which they die in the middle of a clash of multiple middle eastern nations fighting over vested interest in the pieces of Iraq?

I agreed with the goal, not the method and the rank incompetence with which it was carried out. All that said, what I really want to hear now are some ideas on what to do now.